People Are Always Wanting:
Katherine J Barrett interviews
Courtney Bill

Courtney Bill

Fellow summer issue #231 contributor Katherine J Barrett talks with Courtney Bill about Bill's short story, “Dog Eat Dog.” They discuss comfort POVs, writing guides, and ambiguity.

Read an excerpt from “Dog Eat Dog” here.

 

Courtney Bill holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Victoria. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, PRISM international, New Delta Review, The New Quarterly, Plenitude, The Malahat Review, Canthius, The /tƐmz/ Review, Eavesdrop Magazine, Literary Heist, Frighten the Horses, January Magazine, and elsewhere. Her fiction was a finalist for Adroit’s 2024 Prize for Prose judged by Ocean Vuong and Kaveh Akbar. Most recently, she was a finalist for the 2025 Writers’ Union of Canada Short Prose Competition for Emerging Writers.


This story is beautifully crafted. I’d say it was crafted with love. What was the writing process like for you? How many drafts did you write and over what period of time?

That’s so nice. Thank you! I wrote “Dog Eat Dog” in February 2024 over a week and a half, then edited it a few times over the next seven months. I wrote it entirely out of order in little scraps and pieces that I assembled together. I often write like that—flitting all over the place—trying not to stay in one place for too long. It was the first story I’d written in years that was just for fun. I drew pictures of the characters in my notebook during lectures, used arrows and labels to explain what I couldn’t draw well—“scabbed chin,” “Feist haircut,” etc. I never showed the story to anybody before submitting it. Maybe because of this, the story still feels personal and precious to me.

Second person feels perfect here, in part because this is such an intimate story. Did you try other points of view?

Yeah, I first tried to make the story third person! I have no idea why. Second person emerged instead, almost immediately, probably because it’s a comfort POV for me. Whenever I use it, the tone of the story clicks into place.

Writing guidebooks often advise us to create characters who “want something.” In “Dog Eat Dog,” neither character seems to want very much—or rather they don’t know what they want or aren’t ready to say it. And yet the story has tension and a beautiful arc. Did you find this difficult to write? What do you think about throwing out conventional writing advice?

I don’t really think about characters’ desires when I’m drafting, maybe because in a way they feel effortless; the fact of a character immediately necessitates desire of some kind. Whether it is visible to themselves or the reader (or to me). People are always wanting something. In “Dog Eat Dog,” I wanted the characters to be pulled between their love and their dislike and their boredom with each other without letting one emotion dominate the others.

I try not to worry about advice too much when I’m writing. You can eschew every piece of conventional advice and write an awesome story, or follow every piece of advice and write something blah. But the opposite is still true; learning the nuts and bolts has been helpful to me. Ultimately, I have to approach that stuff with a consideration for what feels resonant to me or not. When I’m writing, when I’m thick in the murk of it, it’s best if I’m not thinking about rules at all.

Why did you choose northern locations: Sweden and Churchill? How do these specific locations add to the story?

I’ve never been to either of these places so forgive me, Swedish people and Churchill-ians, but I feel like they pair well with divorce. There is a blankness following a breakup. An uncomfortable openness. These settings felt similar to that experience, but also lent to the atmosphere I was trying to create, which was cold, grimy, and remote. Almost an endangered feeling.

The reason for the Churchill trip at this point in the relationship is not made obvious. Even the protagonist is unsure: “What are we doing here?” Why did you decide to leave this open? More generally, how do you feel about uncertainty or blank spaces in stories?

I drifted towards ambiguity unconsciously here. I liked the bittersweet tension of two characters deciding to go on a trip they’ve always wanted to go on, even though technically, they’re too late. Their relationship is over, but here they are, still. There is an idea below the surface here, that only tragedy—their divorce—could make them finally do what they always wanted to.

Uncertainty is one of my favourite things in fiction! On an aesthetic level, I’m just very interested in that greyness. Near the end of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, she writes, “I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable.” I’ve read The Goldfinch like four times and that line has been absorbed into how I see and write about the world.

I like how ambiguity suggests the answer exists within the story but is for someone else to figure out.

Which short-story writers are you reading now—or which have you found inspiring in general?

I'm really inspired by my friends and peers. Chance Freihaut, Rachel Lachmansingh, Shaelin Bishop. I love Gabriel Smith’s story “The Complete.” When I was a teenager, I had a J.D. Salinger phase. So him, always.

 

Katherine J Barrett

Katherine J Barrett